The eccentric but loving family has long been a staple of American literature, movies, and television, and the Lovelaces of Hamilton, Massachusetts, seemed an exemplar of the species: the father, a minister who collected reptiles and showed Rosemary’s Baby to his stunned congregation; the artistic mother who dreamed of illustrating children’s books; three bright children […]
Witnesses reported that at first, it sounded like snow sliding off a roof, a familiar sound on a mild January day in Lawrence, Massachusetts. But on this day–January 10, 1860–the sound was the precursor to one of the worst industrial accidents in the nation’s history. Around a hundred people, many of them women and children, […]
One of my favorite New England writers is John Hanson Mitchell, whose Ceremonial Time (1984) investigated the “deep history” of Scratch Flat, a one-square-mile piece of ground 35 miles northwest of Boston, from the Ice Age to the Digital Age. His new book, The Paradise of All These Parts (Beacon Press; $24.95), attempts the same […]
Audio: Vermont author Castle Freeman Jr. reads from Go With Me. Listen now. Every September, when the latest edition of The Old Farmer’s Almanac comes out, I turn immediately to the “Farmer’s Calendar,” 14 brief, gemlike essays by Castle Freeman Jr. Afterward, I ask myself two questions: How does he do that? And how does […]
Franklin D. Roosevelt, it is said, counted as the three most brilliant Americans Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Thompson of Concord, New Hampshire. Benjamin who? Well might one ask, and the most enjoyable way to find out arrives in the form of Nicholas Delbanco’s The Count of Concord (Dalkey Archive Press, $34.95), a novel […]
The Classmates: Privilege, Chaos and the End of an Era (Hyperion, $23.95), by longtime Yankee contributor Geoffrey Douglas, is several books: a memoir of his years at St. Paul’s, the New Hampshire prep school that expelled him in 1961; a travelogue of the turbulent decades that followed; and a portrait of his former classmates, including […]
These two books have three things in common: Both are by former Yankee writers from Massachusetts, both are compulsively readable, and both are about quests. Suzanne Strempek Shea’s Sundays in America (Beacon Press, $24.95) begins with the flood of grief that accompanied the death of Pope John Paul II. “As a Catholic who in recent […]
